Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (28 page)

Imagine Saddam’s surprise when the United States reacted to his aggression by likening him to Hitler and organizing, under UN auspices, a global coalition and military operation known as Desert Storm to stop it. But then imagine what he must have thought when the coalition forces halted their destruction of his armies on February 27, 1991, at the order of President Bush. Even more, imagine Saddam’s thinking when the United States and coalition forces did nothing to stop him from using his U.S.-supplied helicopters as gunships to snuff out the uprisings the coalition had incited among northern Kurds and southern Shiites. The reason for this cowardly betrayal was apparently the coalition’s fear that collapse of Saddam’s regime might strengthen Iran’s influence in the region. So Saddam survived because the coalition still wanted him as a shield against the Ayatollahs. Also surviving was the huge Prince Sultan airbase and surveillance establishment, with the thousands of U.S. troops that the Bush administration had put in Saudi Arabia as the first major foreign base ever in that country. It was this presence that outraged Osama bin Laden and came back to haunt us on September 11 and afterward. After conclusion of the Gulf war, UN resolution 687 directed Saddam to destroy his chemical and biological weapons as well as his equipment for developing nuclear weapons, and to permit outside verification that he had done so. A system of UN inspections was established along with no-fly zones in the north and south of the country, in a belated effort to protect the Kurds and Shiites. The inspections were never completely successful in finding and destroying all the weapons; and in response to Iraqi non-cooperation, the UN imposed economic sanctions that resulted in the impoverishment of much of the Iraqi population but not in the destruction of further weapons. The inspections were also compromised by insertion of U.S. intelligence agents as well as by gradually increasing Iraqi obstructions, which the U.S. spying only served to rationalize. From time to time, the United States made unilateral cruise missile strikes at suspected Iraqi weaposn sites, but by 1998 the inspectors had been completely removed. They stayed away from Iraq for four years.

The events of September 11 caused concern that containment might no longer work if there were an alliance between Saddam and terrorist groups under which Iraq would transfer weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda. The new Bush administration, which contained many holdovers from the old Bush administration, thus quickly turned the spotlight on Saddam and the necessity for regime change as the destruction of the Taliban regime was coming to conclusion in Afghanistan. Saddam, they argued, had to go because he had, among other things, used chemical weapons on the Iranians and even gassed his own people. It seemed so obvious that such a bad actor should be gotten rid of that President Bush’s top security officials even told him there was no need to get congressional support for an action to do so. The same Donald Rumsfeld who had solicitously asked Saddam in 1983 if there was anything more the United States could do for him, now as Secretary of Defense urged an immediate, unilateral U.S. attack to remove this thorn from our side as quickly as possible. He claimed as the basis for attack alleged Iraqi violation of the UN’s inspection resolutions and of the agreement ending the 1991 hostilities. So great was the threat, the administration argued, that it required a pre-emptive war. In response to a global outcry against such a move as well as to substantial domestic opposition, the administration asked for and got resolution 1441 with the unanimous vote of the Security Counci as noted in Chapter 1. This resolution called on Saddam to provide complete data on the extent and whereabouts of his weapons of mass destruction and to make this information available for verification to a new contingent of UN inspectors.

The outcry reflected a number of concerns. In the United States, there was great popular reluctance to go to war alone and without the backing of the UN Abroad there was growing fear of unbridled American power. Many observers in both places felt that Iraq was less of a threat than the administration argued. It didn’t have nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles, and evidence of ties to Al Qaeda was very thin. There was also concern that an invasion of Iraq would cause more problems than it solved, destablizing much of the region and perhaps the larger Islamic world, and requiring a long and costly occupation.

The Arab and Islamic countries in particular believed that the U.S. stance was another example of Western double standards and of putting the Iraqi cart before the horse of Israel and Palestine. Why was it unacceptable for Iraq to ignore UN resolutions but perfectly okay for Israel to do so? Before attacking Iraq, they said, you should make a real effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue so that an eventual, if necessary, attack on Iraq will not be seen in the Muslim world as an attack on Islam in favor of the Israeli occupiers of the West Bank and Gaza.
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In the face of these kinds of concerns, the implementation of 1441 became terribly contentious. It was when the initial results indicated less than full Iraqi compliance that Powell made his plea to the Security Council for an ultimatum to Saddam. Instead, led by France and Germany, a number of countries developed plans for intensified inspections. But these were rejected by the U.S., and when attempt at compromise in the Security Council failed, U.S. determination for war, alone, and at odds with others around the world, became a certainty.

As a final note to this part of the tale, in Iran, where the United States has feared to tread for twenty years, the rule of the Ayatollahs is faltering in the face of demands for freedom from the Internet-loving, rock-singing youth of the Islamic Republic. Just as in Vietnam, the further away our troops and guns are the better they like us.

8

Wagging the Dog: Two Tales

B
ecause the subjects of this chapter are politically radioactive, I hesitated long before starting to write. But there is no getting around the huge significance of Israel and Taiwan, both for American foreign policy and for foreign perceptions of the United States. Despite their tiny populations – 6.2 million and 22 million, respectively – I have often felt that America’s differences with the world could be largely explained in four words: Israel, Taiwan, religion, and lobby.

ISRAEL

O
n no subject do the views of the United States and those of virtually all other countries diverge more than on Israel and its interminable conflict with the Palestinians, and there is no greater source of alienation between ourselves and the others. This divergence became very clear in the spring and summer of 2002, when in response to escalating Palestinian suicide bombings, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered his army to carry out reprisals in Gaza and the West Bank. Its destructiveness evoked an international uproar. Despite the prime minister’s defiance of repeated presidential demands for an Israeli withdrawal, Bush said he continued to support Sharon and called him a ‘man of peace.’ On June 24, the president gave a much-anticipated speech calling for eventual creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel, but making such an event contingent on a halt to terror attacks and on the Palestinians’ holding elections to choose new leaders – the current leaders (i.e. Yasir Arafat) being ‘compromised by terror.’ Although the speech referred in passing to eventual Israeli withdrawal, it was clear the onus was on the Palestinians to change if they wanted U.S. help in promoting a peace process. Congressional leaders fell in behind the president, with Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt saying, ‘We will stand with Israel,’ and Republican Senator Mitch Mc-Connell proposing legislation to formally designate the Palestinian Liberation Organization a terrorist group. Significantly, the president closed his speech with the Biblical passage, ‘I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life.’

In using a scriptural reference, Bush reflected the thinking of most Americans whose perspectives on Israel and Palestine are strongly shaped by the Old Testament or Torah story of the land promised by God to the Jews. Americans, both Christian and Jewish, tend to see the Israelis as the heirs of that covenant, with an ancient historic right to at least the land of present-day Israel and perhaps to whatever else was included in the biblical map.

Americans also view Israel as a lot like America – an immigrant nation, a haven for the oppressed, a society of pioneering settlers, a strong and brave country willing to fight for the right, a democracy with a rule of law (the only one in the Middle East), and an oasis of Western consumer culture in an otherwise alien desert. And there are, of course, a lot of Americans in Israel. The ties are close enough that for many Americans, Israel is something like a fifty-first state. Palestinian terrorist attacks are widely reported in the U.S. media and are quickly equated, as in Bush’s speech, with the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and interpreted as an existential threat. The U.S. media are so sensitive to Israeli criticism of their coverage that CNN, in a historic first, actually apologized in response to complaints that its reporting of Israeli-Palestinian battles in the town of Jenin was too favorable to the Palestinians.
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Israeli attacks on Palestinians get less attention and are easily accepted as legitimate self-defense. Israel’s war is seen as America’s war.

The view from the other countries is quite different. While condemning them, few outside the United States see the Palestinian terror attacks on Israel as connected to Al Qaeda. The fear of some analysts in Europe is that continued Israeli pressure on Palestinian areas may generate precisely that highly undesirable fusion of terrors. Commenting on Israeli reprisals, the Lutheran Bishop of Jerusalem said, ‘It seems this is not a war against terrorism. This seems to be a war against the hope and future of the Palestinian people.’
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He went on to add that Israeli use of U.S. weapons and the closeness of U.S.-Israeli ties sometimes gives the impression of U.S. support for this war.

This is the prevalent view in much of the world. I was traveling in Asia at the time of the Israeli reprisals, and the scenes shown on Japanese, Singaporean, Malaysian, and Indonesian television made CNN look one-sidedly pro-Israel. Pictures of U.S.-supplied helicopters and other weapons being used against Palestinian civilians, and of Sharon defying Bush’s demand for withdrawal of Israeli forces, made a deep anti-American impression everywhere, as did the characterization of Sharon as a ‘man of peace.’ It is widely known that Sharon is one of Israel’s toughest hawks with a history of violence against Palestinians and of opposition to peace talks. Said the leading Malaysian writer Dato’ Mohamed Jawhar bin Hassan, ‘How can Bush call a man like that a man of peace? Even pro-American Muslims like me are beginning to think badly of America because it ignores Israeli oppression.’

The Economist
noted that ‘U.S. newspapers don’t print Israeli bulldoz-ings of Palestinian homes, and the United States doesn’t realize the extent to which it is held responsible as the armorer of Israel.’
 3 
Everywhere I went, my interlocutors were quick to note double standards. ‘If America is so upset about weapons of mass destruction, why doesn’t it object to Israel’s nuclear arsenal?’ ‘Why does America insist that some countries strictly observe UN resolutions while making no mention of Israel’s defiance of UN resolutions?’ ‘The United States insists on some countries being democracies, but Israel is not really a democracy.’

Clearly there is a major disconnect. There are two possible explanations. One was voiced recently by Sharon, who called European criticism of Israel biased (implying that it was anti-Semitic)
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– but maybe it’s just a global bias against Israel. The other possibility is that Israel and the United States are isolated on this issue for good reasons. While no person is capable of perfect objectivity, let me, as someone with experience of living with many different peoples, at least try to provide a more balanced view than one often sees either on Fox News or in
Le Monde
.

Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

I arrived in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on September 27, 2002. Even for Americans – and Israel is the one place where one finds not an ounce of anti-Americanism – there was tight security, including a double passport check. There had been another suicide bombing a few days before on a municipal bus in the heart of town that had killed five people and injured another fifty. On the way to the hotel my cab passed Allenby Street, close to where the bus had been blown to pieces. There was no sign of the blast, and the sidewalks were full of people shopping and sipping cappuccinos as if nothing had happened. But everyone knew something had occurred, and that it had done so just a day after another suicide attack had killed a policeman in northern Israel. These had been the first attacks after a six-week lull following the Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza and Bush’s speech in June. Just to be sure everyone understood that neither the president’s speech nor Sharon’s military tactics had changed anything, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, two extremist Palestinian organizations, had claimed responsibility for the new attacks and promised more. Looking at the fashionable street and its harmless activity, I had to wonder what kind of people would actually advertise that they had carried out a mass murder of victims happily engaged in looking for a bargain. Arafat and his Palestinian Authority (PA) had hastened to say they had had nothing to do with it, but few in Israel or the United States believed him.

To the casual observer conditioned by scenes of horror broadcast on CNN, the first impression of Israeli life is one of surprising tranquility. Certainly, every office building and hotel has a security force who give you a hard look as you enter, metal detectors and special passes are ubiquitous, and the government offices look like fortresses. But to anyone who does a fair amount of international travel, the security measures are, if anything, surprisingly unobtrusive. Tel Aviv looks like a Mediterranean version of Santa Monica and goes about its business in the same informal, sun-dappled way. The streets are clogged, and the restaurants and omnipresent Starbucks are sufficiently full to make one puzzle over the newspaper reports of 10-percent unemployment and government deportations of illegal foreign workers. Neither Tel Aviv nor Jerusalem seem like war zones in a country living on handouts.

But you don’t have to dig very deep to find signs of an anxious, troubled life. My morning
Jerusalem Post
has poll results showing that 60 percent of Israelis believe they are in a war for their very existence.
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The background noise is a constant flow of reports of violence. A typical news day here contains stories about a 95-year-old Arab woman shot while riding in a taxi on the West Bank, another suicide bombing in Jerusalem, demolition of Palestinian homes in retaliation for earlier attacks on Israelis, and an Israeli Arab’s successful prevention of a West Bank Arab’s attempt to bomb a bus. This creates constant anxiety. My lunch companion is visibly uneasy. We eat quickly and leave the restaurant, whereupon he tells me there was a diner at a nearby table who made him nervous.

Despite the hustle and bustle, the economy is a disaster. In Jerusalem, I checked in at the Marriott, a large hotel with more than seven hundred rooms overlooking part of the Old City. The Israeli Travel Minister had been gunned down here a few months earlier. I discover I am one of perhaps ten guests. The restaurant is closed except for a continental breakfast. Later, a stroll on the Mount of Olives provides a spectacular panorama of the city and its landmarks, Al Aqsa, the Western Wall, the Old City, and much more. It is one of the great views of the world. Tourism accounts for slightly more than 3 percent of Israel’s GDP, and this is what the tourists come to see. But I am alone except for some forlorn Israeli Arab boys who swarm around trying to sell me a souvenir. I resist until I hear one stage-whisper to another, ‘He’s an American. He won’t buy because they hate us.’ I relent and buy a map and a book. It’s clear that I’m all they’ll be eating on tonight, and they don’t care if I leave the stuff behind in my hotel.

But my little stimulus package won’t do it for the Israeli economy. Forecast to shrink by nearly 3 percent this year, it is also experiencing 8-percent inflation.
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Despite a government debt second only to that of Japan and declining credit ratings, the Israeli government is asking for U.S. guarantees for further loans as well as for $4 billion in new military aid – about $645 for every Israeli. Maintaining a military establishment and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza keeps a large proportion of the population tied up manning checkpoints, rooting out terrorists, and protecting settlers. The burden is enormous and unsustainable without aid from the United States. As James Bennet of the
New York Times
told me, ‘the Israeli economy doesn’t add up, but all the contradictions are masked by fighting.’ And supported by private and official donations from the United States. This is the embattled, besieged Israel that largely shapes the American perception.

Jewish Settlers and Israeli Arabs

Yet while a majority of Israelis say they are fighting for their very existence, many have different existences in mind. One powerful force is the Israeli settlers. In the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel’s pre-emptive attack on threatening Arab armies in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan resulted in its occupation of the West Bank of the Jordan River, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai desert. The Israelis swapped the Sinai for peace with Egypt in 1979 but held onto the rest, pending peace agreements with the other parties, which have yet to materialize. In truth, they did much more than hold onto the territories. They annexed East Jerusalem, with its historic holy sites, in 1967 and moved their capital to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. They also began to plant new Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and around Jerusalem with two objectives in mind: to establish a security belt against future attack; and to fulfill the Biblical designation of Palestine as the land God had promised to the Jews. From their beginning, these settlements have been the source of great conflict and controversy. Most experts consider them illegal under articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention stipulating that an occupying power cannot annex occupied territory or move part of its population into the occupied area. They are also arguably at odds with UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for Israeli ‘withdrawal from occupied territories’ in the context of an eventual peace agreement. They are certainly in defiance of the demands of every U.S. president from Jimmy Carter to the current President Bush, and their doubling during the past few years has certainly been in violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Oslo peace process commitments of 1993.

More importantly, the settlements mean taking land from Palestinians, building checkpoints and special access roads, and doing a hundred other things that cause friction between Israelis and Palestinians. The first settlements were few, small, and mostly strategic. But under Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon in 1977, the Likud Party sponsored a major effort to expand the settlements. Begin was a firm believer in what he called ‘Eretz Israel’ or ‘Greater Israel,’ meaning all the territory of Mandatory Palestine. The Israeli government began to provide financial incentives to settlers, offering them housing and other amenities they could never afford in Israel proper. As a result, the settler population has grown from a few thousand in the late 1970
s
to nearly 400,000 today,
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and the full territorial reach of the settlements, including military zones and special access roads, is estimated at about 42 percent of the West Bank.